The Importance Of Indigenous Knowledge And Sustainable Development

INTRODUCTION

Sustainable development is the capacity to maintain a resource, an outcome, or a process (Jenkins, 2013), and to it, Mervyn Claxton attempts to associate indigenous knowledge, which in turn is described as the processes used by indigenous people in contrast to modern ways of doing things. In Claxton’s (2010) lecture entitled ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development’, he notes that indigenous knowledge has been recognized as ‘the most effective method of promoting sustainable development.’ Indeed, decades of studies have been focused on how indigenous people proceed with their survival especially in the context of agriculture. Nevertheless, the big question is, is eco-indigenous knowledge, as Claxton calls it, indeed the most effective method to bolster sustainable development?

The five problems are as follows: “a focus on the (arte)factual; binary tensions between western science and indigenous knowledge systems; the problem of differentiation and power relationships; the romanticisation [sic] of indigenous knowledge; and… decontextualization of indigenous knowledge” (Briggs, 2005). Briggs claims that despite the countless studies done for decades on indigenous knowledge, researchers tend to neglect the said problems. In fact, in 2013, three years after the lecture of Claxton, Briggs again notes the disappointment of Sillitoe, a noted expert in indigenous knowledge as well. As it turns, Sillitoe is disappointed that after two decades, initiatives on the use of indigenous knowledge for sustainable development have failed (Briggs, 2013). Indeed, if we look at Africa, one of the regions with the richest indigenous knowledge to share, development is far from